More news about Google. If you use FeedBurner, you’d know that Google acquired them and here is a positive fallout from that acquisition.

If you have been paying for FeedBurner PRO, you won’t be billed for June 2007 and after. For everyone else, it is free and you can activate the FeedBurner Stats PRO right now in your FeedBurner account.

From the FeedBurner Blog..

PRO is feed analytics taken to the next level. You will now have access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content.

FeedBurner subscriber number have been a little bit of a mystery to me. I noticed that my RSS subscribers would fall during the weekends and slowly gain back up to the normal level midweek. I used to panic and attributed the decrease to my not posting in the weekends. It just turns out that the subscriber number you see is actually the number of people who have hit your feed at that time. 300 people might have subscribed to your blog, but if 200 of them were out vacationing for a long weekend and didn’t read your feed, you’ll see your feed slump dangerously.

May be the PRO stats might help understand how all this works a little bit better.

For the detailed tracking, if you already use FeedFlare in your site then you don’t need to do anything additional. FeedFlare is the customizable set of links you see at the bottom of each post like ‘Stumble it!, Digg This, etc that enables the reader to share the post in a variety of ways with others.

I really appreciate Google making this PRO service free but I am in fact looking forward to its integration with Google Analytics and WebMaster Tools so all these stats can be managed from one place. And I can’t wait.

That’s true, Kyle. I used to be really fond of Google but as they seem to fill every space that I use on the internet sometimes it just doesn’t feel right. May be it’s just human to feel that way.. but I still love the way they make things simple and free to use.

You have made my day! 🙂 I am really glad to have you hear and would love to hear your views.

I won’t say I have a love and hate relationship with Google but I can’t sometimes hide the uneasy feeling. They seem to good to be true. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking sooo hard into the mouth of a ‘G’ift horse!